There are legions of good
racers who have tilted at the Windmills of a Land Speed Record many times and
never come out on top. There are competent racers who have gone to the
Utah Salt Flats every year for decades and never set a Land Speed
Record.

Going fast requires a TON
of power. Air resistance goes nuts with speed, increasing
exponentially as the cube of the increase in speed. Air
resistance over 120 mph becomes extreme, which is the speed at which a human
body free-falling through the air (prior to pulling the ripcord!)
reaches terminal velocity and will not fall any faster. If you could go
100 mph on, say, 80 horsepower, to double speed to 200 mph requires 640
horsepower! If you could go 150 mph on, say, 210 horsepower, doubling
speed to 300 mph requires 1680 horsepower!

Once you’re making a ton of
power, you typically need to run hard for a relatively long time--minutes
rather than seconds like a drag car. And then you need to run again
within four hours, with the car in the meantime locked in impound where
certain repairs are impossible. Mechanical parts flogged to the limit
over the required 4-7 miles of super high speed running take a terrible
pounding, and thermal loading can increase to fatal levels as the minutes
tick by. Melt-downs are endemic to salt-flat racing.

And then there is the
question of tuning. Truly fast cars have virtually no good way to test
at design speed at full power until they actually arrive on the desolate
dead-level salt flats 100 miles west of Salt Lake City. Where can you
run a car flat-out at 200-300 mph for 4-7 miles without lifting the throttle except
at Bonneville? For many competitors, Salt Flat racing is more akin to
an R&D and tuning nightmare than a race.

For one thing, the air is
thin at Bonneville, because the altitude is over 4300 feet. This means
the atmosphere is less than 90 percent as thick as the air at sea
level. Normally-aspirated engines lose about 3-percent of their power
for every 1,000 feet of altitude, but there’s also the double-whammy that
tuning that worked well at sea level in California may be rich (or lean!) at
Bonneville, even if you’re fuel-injected and turbocharged. It’s a fact
of life that sanctioning bodies typically force you to use “event fuel”, very
high octane stuff that may have different specific gravity and energy content
from what your engine’s used to.

Even very fast well-tuned
cars can run into very bad luck: The salt surface can change radically,
depending on the weather. Tires that worked well for dry salt may be
all wrong when the salt is wet from a sudden rain storm. Cross-winds
mess with your handling and aerodynamics—on occasion catastrophically.

Bonneville is not for the
faint of heart.

Dr. Bill Gordon was an
owner-racer looking for the right project car that could go fast enough to
take a shot at a Land Speed Record without the task becoming a Manhattan
Project. Gordon’s “Other Car” was the “World’s Fastest Ferrari,” a
Norwood-Autocraft 300-mph Ferrari 308 with 288-GTO body panels and a 500-inch
Twin-turbo big block V8 that had already proven itself the fastest sports car
on the planet by making easy work of 250 mph. This time, psychologist
Gordon was looking for something the kids at his Fairhill School could get
involved with and “own.” Something that could make a difference in the
lives of some bright kids who struggled with learning disabilities like
dyslexia. A project that was difficult but not impossible.
Expensive but not too expensive. So he went to Bob Norwood.

Bob Norwood was a
Dallas-based supertuner, Ferrari hotrodder and speed freak of long standing
who, in addition to building Gordon’s Top-Gun 8.2-liter 288 Ferrari, had
years before captured the 3.0-liter naturally-aspirated Land Speed Record
with a stock-displacement 308 Ferrari. He still owned that record more
than 15 years later. Norwood was a Bonneville veteran who had also
built streamliners and other exotic speed vehicles and raced many times at
the desolate salt flats flanked by mountains 100 miles west of Salt Lake city
that are the remnants of prehistoric Lake Bonneville and provide up to 15
miles of runway for vehicles trying to go very fast.

Norwood was enthusiastic
about managing Gordon’s project and acting as crew chief at Bonneville,
immediately suggested acquiring a Toyota MR2 Turbo. This was no
coincidence. Norwood had already proven the power potential of the MR2
Turbo’s 3S-GTE powerplant, deriving output approaching 600 horsepower on
gasoline from a heavily modified MR2 for Sport Compact Car magazine’s
Project MR2 street car in ‘97 and ‘98. Norwood had followed that up by
building 3S-GTE powerplants with power approaching 900-hp! The
MR2’s four-cylinder 2.0L 86mm x 86mm engine size was eminently suitable for a
run at the various smaller-displacement Bonneville classes in the 1.0-2.5
liter size. Besides big power potential, a 1991+ MR2 has the kind of
good aerodynamics that are de rigueur at Bonneville. The MR2,
referred to by some as the “Poor Man’s Supercar,” looks a lot like a
Ferrari 308, and Norwood knew the aero would be good over the mid-engine
four-banger. Actually, quite a few men who were not poor had
dumped money into MR2s, proving it capable of perhaps the highest streetable
specific power of any production “Import Performance” powerplant.
Norwood needed a wildly powerful MR2, so he went to James Patterson.

James Patterson was a
former Norwood Autocraft exotic engine builder who had recently bought
Norwood’s engine-building, Ferrari and exotic car service, and
super-high-output performance-upgrades business, and was still based out of
the same building in Dallas as Norwood Autocraft, which now focused
exclusively on complete exotic-car construction, custom engine-management
system design, and chassis dyno tuning. Patterson volunteered to have
the new company—Norwood Performance—build a super-high output MR2 engine and
modify an MR2 to make it capable of “safely” exceeding 200 mph.

The day Gordon wrote a
check and found himself the proud owner of a 1991 MR2 Turbo, the Land Speed
Records for stock-body 1.5L and 1.0L sports cars were 142 and zero
mph.

In Quest of the World’s Fastest MR2

The MR2 project kicked off informally
the day Gordon bought a ’91 MR2 Turbo for less than $10K and shipped it over
to Norwood’s Dallas supercar shop conveniently close to the Fairhill School
in Dallas where Gordon and a small team of kids from the school could, on
occasion, watch the car go together and even potentially help out.

In spite of the excellent
possibilities of the 2.0L 3S-GTE motor, Norwood quickly decided to discard
the 2.0L motor and work with an exotic 1.6L Japanese-only 20-valve 4AG
powerplant, complete with individual-cylinder throttlebodies, five valves per
cylinder, and computer-controlled variable intake-cam phasing.
This motor could straightforwardly be de-stroked to 1.49 and .99 liters in a
quest for the 1.5L (H-class) and 1.0L (I-Class) Blown GT and Blown Modified
Sports classes at the salt flats.

The main point of using
Toyota’s smaller exotic 20-valve 4AG powerplant was that it was
smaller to start and could more easily be further reduced in size compared to
the 3S-GTE MR2 powerplant, an iron-block phenomenon built strong as an
artillery piece that had been run at super-stock power levels by everyone
from high-school dropouts to Pikes Peak racers like Millen. However,
the 4AG motor appeared more problematic over 600 horsepower than the 3S-GTE,
and James Patterson and the Norwood Performance techs would have their work
cut out prepping the little motor to survive at such extreme power levels.

However, the breathing of
the 5-valve-per cylinder head was already phenomenal (though not necessarily
better than the 4-valve 3S-GTE except at partial valve lift when the valve
circumference is more important than the total full-open valve area).
Okay, the production 20-valve 4AG motor ran out of cam way below the stock
redline at something like 6,000 RPMs, but custom cams could easily fix that
problem. In fact, the race engine that would power Gordon’s MR2 Turbo
in a quest for FOUR Land Speed Records in supercharged Bonneville classes
used a stock 20-valve head with nothing more than a fresh valve job
and very good super-high-speed valve springs and retainers.

Breathing 22,000 Times Per Minute

With a goal of an 11,000
RPM redline, each valve must open and close 92 times a second. With
this in mind, the Norwood team installed a set of serious valve springs
designed to resist 45 psi boost against closed intake valves and control
float at extreme RPM via closed spring pressure of 85 psi and open pressure
of 145 psi at .300 lift.

In the quest for super-high
RPM performance, the Norwood team next installed extremely high-lift, long
duration cams capable of producing power deep into the 10,000 RPM range, and
simultaneously modified the stock variable valve timing system for better
performance at high RPM. Toyota’s variable Cam Phasing system on the
4AG 20-valve uses hydraulic oil pressure inside a diagonally-splined cam
sprocket on the intake cam under computer control to force it to move on its
sprocket relative to the exhaust cam, thus increasing valve overlap for
better efficiency at high engine speeds. Norwood Performance altered
cam timing from the stock minus-five degrees initial + 15 to 17-degrees
initial + 15, with total advance limited via a custom positive-stop set-screw
at 26 degrees combined intake cam advance.

Living to Tell

Norwood Performance
equipped the 4AG powerplant with standard and non-standard super-duty custom
parts and anti-failure countermeasures. These included lightweight
Pauter connecting rods designed to survive extreme tension forces on the rod
bolts of up to 180,000 pounds at 11,000 RPMs, a Norwood Performance custom
crank-girdle to reinforce the main bearing caps and keep them from “walking”
under heavy load at high-RPM, a custom Rody 43XX billet-steel crankshaft, and
a set of 3.200-inch bore custom super-duty forged JE pistons. The
billet crank had stroke reduced from 3.025-inches to 2.830. Displacement
shrank from 1.6 to 1.5 Liters.

In a somewhat controversial
move, Norwood Performance set initial static compression ratio at 9:1—high
for an engine designed to gobble as much as 45 psi turbo boost. There
was a good reason: On the way to supercharged glory, Norwood figured to
take a backhand swipe at a Land Speed Record in the naturally-aspirated
H Class—just for fun and to provide a relatively safe venue for a teenage
student driver from the Fairhill School who would represent all Fairhill
students at the salt flats. High static compression helps a
naturally-aspirated engine rev fast and hard; the final effective compression
ratio would be a function of the complex interaction between static
compression ratio, cam timing, and boost pressure.

To improve lubrication,
provide hood clearance and keep weight as low as possible, Norwood and crew
tilted the engine forward and fabricated a custom steel oil pan--and
installed a multi-stage dry-sump oiling system to improve crankcase
aerodynamics and keep flying oil and windage from slowing down the crank at
speeds up to 11K RPMs. Norwood’s team simultaneously reworked the
engine and trans mounts to raise the little 4AG engine and tranny 3.5 inches
in order to bring the back of the car down close to the salt while
maintaining good suspension geometry. The decreased engine height and
Powertrain relocation enabled the team to lower the MR2 body for minimal
clearance above the salt with greatly decreased drag.

Engine Management and Boost

Norwood Performance techs
converted the 4AG engine for turbocharging by constructing a stainless-steel
header system made from equal-length mandrel-bent tubing and 304 stainless
flanges. They installed a Turbonetics T04 turbocharger with P-trim
compressor and T-61-trim turbine, with the turbine housing A/R ratio set at
.81. The team installed a Turbonetics Racegate with the goal of
limiting boost to 40 psi.

Norwood selected a Motec M8
engine system to manage the engine and installed sensors and actuators for
direct-fire ignition, using monster 1,700 cc/min injectors capable of fueling
at least 150-hp per cylinder at 85 psi fuel pressure. Norwood’s team
installed an electro-pneumatic actuator that could regulate boost under Motec
control by pulse-modulating the wastegate manifold pressure reference to
provide pre-programmed and cockpit-selectable boost pressures ranging from a
nominal 20 psi anywhere on to blow-up. Twin in-tank and in-line high-pressure
electric fuel pumps supplied fuel.

To withstand the enormous
thermal and mechanical loading of long-duration Speed-Record runs, the
Norwood team built a trunk-mounted air-water intercooler cooled with water
routed through a large heat-sink tank which was cooled by a heat-exchanger
built from a converted MR2 A/C condenser unit mounted ahead of the radiator.

The Bonneville MR2 Comes Together

The Norwood team rebuilt
the stock MR2 transaxle. To get power to the ground, they installed a five-inch
single-disc carbon clutch of the type no longer legal on an Indycar.
The team installed a Tilton Super-starter with a matching small ring gear,
and fitted the engine with a miniature Denso alternator.

Meanwhile, the
Norwood-Gordon-Fairhill team completely gutted the interior of the 1991 MR2
Turbo to remove weight, installing the required full roll cage, fire-control
systems, and driver’s race seat. Along the way, they removed all
unnecessary electro-mechanical equipment, including the heater, the A/C
system and plumbing, and no less than five computers which the stock
MR2 Turbo uses handle chores such as cruise control, anti-theft, electric
power-steering, anti-lock brakes, and so on. The team removed the rear
anti-roll bar, which they considered dead-weight on the Salt Flats.
Safety equipment included an 11-lb fire-system, aluminum race seat, Diest
five-point harness, and a window net.

Externally, the Norwood
race team removed the MR2’s rear wing, and installed mandatory spoiling rails
on the roof to keep the car from trying to fly if it turns sideways, and a
roof-flap that pops up in the wind if the car spins backward to cut the air
and spoil all lift.

Bob Norwood mapped the
Motec engine management system on the Norwood Autocraft Dynojet chassis
dynamometer, providing fuel and ignition calibration data at breakpoints from
vacuum to 50 psi boost. Unfortunately, it was impossible to load the
engine to the extent it would encounter at Bonneville when driving the weight
of the car across the salt against the enormous air-resistance of speeds
above 150 mph. Some of the numbers at certain engine loads where
guesses that were not possible to achieve in the Dallas shop. On the
dyno, the Toyota 4AG engine managed to achieve at least 34 psi boost on the
dyno in the relatively thick barometric pressure of Dallas, Texas, 600 feet
above seal level.

In ready-to-rumble trim,
the car weighed in at 2400 pounds.

Y2k: A 1.5L Land Speed
Record. Or Bust

In 1999, a team campaigning
an Alfa Romeo Guilette Spyder had set the 1.5L blown modified sports (H/BMS)
record at 140 mph with the supercharged Alfa Romeo.

The Alfa guys were back in
2000 when the MR2 and its crew of Norwood professionals and Gordon and the
Fairhill school kids arrived at Bonneville. The Alfa team batted first
in the forced-induction H Class, and immediately pushed the record up to 152
mph.

A young driver from the
Fairhill School, newly licensed, had previously done his best to run the MR2
very fast in practice runs on the salt, but the MR2 proved tricky enough to
drive that it quickly became clear that any serious safe attempt at a record
would require the skills of someone more experienced. Owner Bill Gordon
test-drove the short-wheelbase MR2, which he found “busy” at high speed
without an anti-roll bar. Gordon drove the MR2 and but then decided to
turn over the wheel to Norwood driver Tom Stephens.

Stephens was an experienced
racer with a resume that included setting track records in the Norwood Doom
and Doom II Porsche racers on various road courses. Stephens had also
successfully driven Norwood Ferrari and Porsche race cars in various
road-course and drag racing events around the country. Stephens had
quickly proved his ability to drive fast on the salt and set a 250 mph Land
Speed Record in the glamour AA/MS class that distinguishes the fastest sports
car on the planet, the 8.2 liter Norwood-Gordon twin-turbo Ferrari 288-GTO
conversion.

Stephens suited up and took
the wheel of the MR2 in the summer of 2000.

“On our first run out of
the trailer,” says Norwood, “the MR2 went 205 mph. We heard some people
had trouble believing our car could be legal; you’re not supposed to pound
the record by 70 miles per hour.”

The Norwood car went into
impound where you get four hours to fix any problems and make the required
backup run whereby your official speed is considered to be the lesser of the
two maximum speeds attained in runs over the same best measured mile of the
course.

The Alfa Team stood by
helplessly watching as their hours-old speed record stretched its wings and
prepared to fly the coop to faster territory. But in the meantime, the
Norwood team had its own troubles.

“We immediately knew there
was a problem from the way the MR2 cranked,” says Norwood. “The Event
Fuel ran lean in the 1.5L 20-valve motor even though it ran rich in the big
car [8.2L Ferrari].” The Motec datalog showed exhaust gas temperature
had jumped to 1970 in the number three cylinder, just as driver Stephens
lifted the throttle at the end of the last mile. The other three
cylinders peaked at 1930, 1910, 1915, and clearly were not damaged.

“We pulled the head in
about an hour,” says Norwood, “and saw that the number three cylinder had
been torched between the two exhaust valves, with a great big path cut
through the head down to the piston. That was it, the head was
totaled.”

At this point it was
clearly out of the question that Norwood’s team could make the four-hour
impound limit. Assuming the engine could be fixed, the team would have
to start over.

“Fortunately we had a spare
20-valve head,” says Norwood. “In the meantime, the Alfa crew was still
complaining our engine couldn’t be legal size given our results that were
fifty mph faster than what they had done. We’re certified engine
builders and are automatically assumed to know the engine size and be honest
about it. But since we were already tearing down the top end, we invited
the officials over to measure bore and stroke.” The officials decided
the powerplant was precisely legal at 98 cubic inches.

“Unfortunately,” say
Norwood, “the spare head had never been on the block. I had to drill it
out for the huge head studs we were using in the block. With a hand
drill. Which took three hours and nearly wrecked my arms.”

At this point, Patternson
and built up the new head with the high-RPM valve springs and retainers,
while Norwood worked on replacing the melted piston in the short block.
“I used Muriatic acid to remove aluminum stuck to the cylinder walls,” says
Norwood, “then prepped the cylinder wall with Scotch Brite. Everything
worked out perfectly except for this one quarter-sized spot five-thousandths deep
burned into the cylinder wall which we couldn’t fix.”

With the engine finally
mechanically sound, the exhausted Norwood team buttoned up the engine and car
and went back to their hotel for the night.

Gasoline and Salt

In the morning, the Norwood
teams arrived back at the Salt to discover the supercharged Alfa Team had
given up and departed.

Meanwhile, Norwood had
other concerns besides the competition or lack thereof. In the current
state of tune, the MR2 had already eaten one of its pistons. It was
clear from overnight datalog analysis that the engine system had certain
problems. For one thing, the air-water intercooler had not proven
sufficiently effective at the extreme power levels the engine had actually
developed at Bonneville in high gear with 30 psi boost against a wall of air
resistance at 205 mph. Air temperature had been rising from 60-degrees
in the lower gears to 210 degrees—hot!—as the water reservoir heat-soaked
during a run.

“I knew I had to do
something to the engine to ‘safe it up’ a bit,” says Norwood.

A compounding problem was
that the fuel pressure was insufficiently high to fuel the enormous dynamic
range of an engine which idled like a tiny economy car and then rose up on
its hind legs and peaked at over 600 horsepower at high RPM. The
combination of over 150 horses per cylinder and RPM so extreme that the
engine made 92 power pulses per second at max speed left very little time
available to squirt fuel into the engine even with the largest available
injectors operating at 100-percent duty-cycle.

Another problem was boost
creep: The Norwood team had equipped the MR2 with a huge Turbonetics
Racegate wastegate and an electronic wastegate controller under Motec
control, but the car developed so much power, that even at 4300 feet above
sea level the wastegate could not bypass enough exhaust gases to effectively
limit boost, which went out of sight when the engine was really loaded at
high speed. “The engine just went crazy with boost, went nuts,” says
Norwood, “and the wastegate couldn’t control it.”

The team installed a Kenne
Bell Boost-A-Pump on the second high-pressure fuel pump to overdrive the
motor with boosted voltage. Norwood recalibrated the on-board computer
for 90 psi fuel pressure with safe, rich mixtures.

The Norwood team then began
a series of high-speed runs designed to simultaneously go faster and optimize
engine tuning parameters: The car ran 160. With leaner tuning
180. With leaner tuning 195, then 200, then 205, then 207.

“I finally got to the point
where it had a perfect map in it,” says Norwood, “and just about that time
the motor started to show a little blow-by. On the last day it was
slowing down. We went out to try and bump the record at bit more, but
now it wouldn’t quite run 200. I suspect the rings got tired of running
on that ratty low spot, and started ragging out the rings. Or maybe the
engine just didn’t like running all that boost.”

However, by the time the
Norwood team was finished, the final and slowest run of the Norwood Gordon
Fairhill MR2 had established a new Land Speed Record of 199 mph, almost 50
miles per hour faster than the number two Alfa sports car.

Gordon, Norwood, Stephens,
and the entire Norwood Team of professionals and Fairhill School kids had
realized the dream of setting a Land Speed Record a fraction of a mile per
hour below 200.

The MR2 Goes Small: 2001 1.0L
Engine

When the year 2000 rolled
over to 2001, the Land Speed Records for the 1.0-liter supercharged I-Class
were 70 mph in I/GT and zero in I/BMS (no one had ever even competed
in the I-Class blown modified sports with a one-liter engine).

In the new year, the
Norwood team set about to reduce the displacement of the ’91 MR2 Turbo in
order to murder both supercharged I-Class records.

Norwood Performance ordered
up a new billet-steel Rody crankshaft with reduced stroke that decreased the
1.6L Toyota 20-valve 4AG engine from the 1.49 liter displacement that had
qualified it for the H Class in 2000. With only a hair over one inch of
stroke, the new engine would now displace just 999 cc’s.

The Norwood Team was
immediately forced to install smaller injectors in the tiny powerplant in
order that injection pulsewidth was long enough to be sufficiently repeatable
that the engine would idle adequately with its bike-sized displacement.

In the meantime, Norwood’s
crew had changed turbochargers on the mini-4AG engine and reconstructed the
air-water intercooler to make it considerably more effective at controlling
inlet air temperature than it had been on the 1.5L version of the engine in
2000. A Turbonetics turbo was selected with the goal of making a
maximum 45 psi boost and power possible equal to that of the 1.5L motor.

Other 2001 changes included
the Norwood team re-installing a stock rear sway bar on the MR2 to take some
of the roll out of the car for speeds over 200 mph. “I would never have
thought roll would be an issue on the salt,” says driver Stephens, “but it
was. In 2001, the MR2 wasn’t as much of a handful to drive because horsepower
was down. However, boost now came in later with a huge rush at higher
RPM compared to the 1.5L version of the car.”

“We added a lot more boost
to the 1.0L motor,” says Norwood. “If you look at the dyno sheets, the
engine has BIG power at 6,500, big power on up into the 9,500-10,000 range,
then it goes down a bit. The sweet spot’s between 6,500 and 10K.
I had assumed power would be much higher if we ran way up there above 10K,
but the engine is happy between 6,500 and 10,000, it works there, and we have
a good gear combination for that range. So we left it alone.”

Norwood knew that if the
MR2 could maintain 45 psi boost throughout the RPM range, the tiny 1.0L
engine could push the car to 200 mph, even with only 65-percent the
displacement available when the car had attained 207.

In the end, scheduling
considerations limited the amount of time available for extensively testing
the MR2 with its new mini-motor prior to the late-summer 2001 trip to the
Salt, but the engine had definitely proven itself capable of at least 450-hp
on Norwood’s Dynojet chassis dynamometer.

On an ominous note, on the
dyno, the car encountered anomalous operating conditions at high load that
seemed to demand better ignition at extreme boost. The Norwood team
installed four MSD 6-series igniter boxes to energize the four direct coils
of the 4AG motor, ripped off some R&D dynoruns, and headed for the salt.

The 1.0 LSR

Salt Conditions were nearly
perfect for the first time in years when the Norwood Team arrived at
Bonneville with the 1.0-liter MR2 in 2001. Good salt would improve
high-speed stability for all competitors, but it was especially good for the
short-wheelbase MR2. With the sway bar in place on the Norwood MR2,
Stephens decided the car was a “real dream” to drive.

It was not a real dream to launch.
The engine had such small displacement, light reciprocating weight, and poor
low-end torque that it would stall under all conditions from a dead stop
without special countermeasures. Stephens’ de facto launch method
quickly became to rev it hard to 4,000 and massively slip the 5-inch carbon
clutch to get the car moving. Once RPM moved into the “sweet spot”
above 6,000 rpms, power would come on hard and the car would accelerate very
well to 10,000—in the first few gears. In the bright sun against the
dead-level bleached-white salt with the only frame of reference distant
mountains, there was little sensation of speed other than the increasing wind
noise and the diving and shuddering of the short-wheelbase car on rough spots
of the cement-like salt surface as speed increased beyond 100 mph.

The car immediately set a
Land Speed Record in the I/GT class the first day out at 132 mph, and the
Norwood Team proceeded with plans to push the envelope as far as possible.

But, as usual on the salt
flats, there was trouble. Manifold pressure became maddeningly unstable
as speed increased into the 150-mph range. Stephens would hear the
engine surging, with power moving up and down in 4th and 5th
gear. He wondered if something mechanical might be opening and
closing. To eliminate the possibility the wastegate was fluttering, the
Norwood crew removed it, to no avail.

In the end, the Norwood
team was forced into an exhaustive on-site R&D effort that made use of
the only testing regime possible on the salt flats, a lengthy series of high
speed runs: Wait in the interminable line of race cars queued up for
the next high-speed run. Make the next experimental run with one or
maybe a few parameters changed. Tow the MR2 back to the pit area to
analyze the results and data. Huddle to decide what’s next.
Execute the changes as fast as possible and then back in line as fast as
possible.

Crew Chief Norwood set about
methodically to achieve a good, stable state of tune. But after
converting the Motec from throttle-position to Manifold Absolute
Pressure-based air-fuel tables and touching up the ignition and air-fuel Maps
such that engine management was theoretically perfect under all boost
conditions, the instability only became WORSE.

Eventually, Norwood
realized that the program had a design flaw. It was encountering a wall
of air resistance approaching 150 that required extremely high boost in order
for the tiny engine to develop sufficient power to push through. And
there was the rub: The engine was so small that the boost pressure
ratios required in the realm of the lower air-flow ranges in 4th
and 5th gears to achieve the necessary power levels to accelerate
were so high that the operating point on the turbocharger’s compressor map
had crossed over the surge-line into an unstable realm. The MR2 would
proceed quickly through the first several gears with no problems, but when it
was time for the shift into high gear, air resistance was so extreme that
boost would build to 345 KPA as relatively low engine air-flow, the engine
would push the car hard against the wall of air resistance, the car would
start to accelerate hard, and suddenly a pressure wave would surge backward
through the centrifugal compressor of the turbocharger and boost would crash
back to 265 KPA boost. The situation was a little like trying to launch
a car missing first gear or an offshore boat potentially capable of very high
speed that didn’t have the power needed in the range required to get it up on
plane.

Stephens and Norwood tried
a range of strategies to avoid the fatal turbo surge. Reducing the
boost pressure to 22 psi via adjustments to the electronic wastegate avoided
surge, but then the car didn’t have the power to exceed 150 mph.
Stephens tried slipping the clutch during the transition from 4th
and 5th gear, but at higher rpm the problem only got worse.
“You’re spinning the turbo faster,” says Norwood, “and you’re already up
against the surge line. It gets worse. We had a good turbo, but
we had the wrong unit or possibly needed compound turbocharging [the first
turbo blowing into the second such that neither encounters extreme pressure
ratios at low air-flow].”

The upside of the new
engine setup was that everything else was working very well. The
new intercooler exhibited outstanding thermal efficiency. The car’s
high-speed controllability was excellent. In spite of the turbo surge,
the car managed to achieve a one-way high-water-mark of 165-mph over a
two-mile stretch.

And the MR2 had achieved
outstanding results. With the best efforts of the Norwood crew, the MR2
set I-Class two-way records in Blown GT and Modified Sports classes at 152
mph. Two records had, indeed, been murdered, one by 82 mph, the other
by 152 mph!

Not bad for a tiny engine
smaller than many motorcycles that was pushing a production sports car over
2,000 pounds.

The Future

Clearly there is an upside
available when the Norwood crew returns to the salt in 2002 with the 999 cc
MR2. This summer, the car will again run in Class I/GT and I/MS
1.0, in the later with the body altered to eliminate the notch above the
MR2’s rear mid-engine. Following the summer’s fun at the salt, Gordon
hopes to sell the car along with both the H-and I-class motors.

Bob Norwood firmly believes
both I and H records are “soft” and can be raised further. And,
of course, there’s the potential for using the car as a platform to
attack 2.0 and 2.5 Classes with the 3S-GTE motor—or perhaps even the
3.0 class with a bolt-in Toyota 3VZ-FE or 1MZ-FE 4-cam 3.0L V6!